BellaOnline Forums Beauty and Self Hair my hair is terrible after bleaching

Hi, i let a friend of mine convince me to go blonde. Bad Idea. she bleached my hair and now it looks terrible. The top part is very yellow and the back is like light brown with an orangey color. The yellow is to bright for my skin color. We used a dark blonde over the bleached hair. I just want to fix this and cant afford to go to the salon. Should i try highlighting it or can i just color over it with a reddish brown color. Red looks good on me. Thank you in advance. I need help.

If you do not want to go to a stylist, the best thing you can do is a medium to dark brown that has red in it. The hair lightens in three stages: red, orange, and yellow. Red is the largest color molecule so it lightens first, then orange, and yellow is the smallest and most difficult. Home bleaching kits usually never get beyond the yellow stage. Also depending on how you bleached it you can get hot spots and some areas lighten better than others, which sounds like what happened to you.

The reason I say the medium to dark red brown is because you need to rebuild the color molecules. You might have to use a couple boxes as well as the color might not fully take on the first try.

Also, because you bleached it you will have to recolor your hair more often because the bleached out hair will not hold color molecules from the box too well verses the color from a stylist which uses less if no amonia. You might even consider putting an ash brown on either before or after your red brown.

My professional advice, chaulk this up to a learning experience and go see a professional. They will be able to help you out and do the least amount of damage.

I used to bleach my hair peroxide white all the time - it sounds like the colour didn't lift enough or you didn't use enough product to coat the hair, people usually panic and think its going orange, but it does go through, orange to yellow to white (where the hair is stripped of colour) - I would never use anything with red in it as it can affect you're hair colour permanantly. I would have just bleached it again - and then used a blonde or silver toned hair dye, that stuff always gets rid of the yellow tones and is a purple/blue shampoo used for grey hair.
Other than that, just dye it a dark brown - but it will fade fast because the hair will now be so pourus from the bleach.